Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Lots Of Stuff

Thrasher

I made a slight detour last week from my training of Amarr vessels in order to pick up the basic knowledge needed to equip and operate small Tech II projectile weapons. This addition adds two formidable ships to my ever growing list of frigate-sized armamant which is currently made up of most Gallente frigates, most Amarr frigates (too bad they suck) and now a couple Minmatar frigates. While the Rifter is easily the most popular frig in the game for pirates and quite cost-efficient and effective, I've found myself drawn instead to the Thrasher.

There are lots of generally effective frigates but the Thrasher is in a class of it's own as the only really generally effective destroyer. The Cormorant makes a good special purpose sniper, the Catalyst makes a great suicide ganker and the Coercer reprocesses well into minerals. The Thrasher however with its good range, damage, speed and slot layout means that it can be fit in a number of ways that makes it well-rounded and flexible enough to use as a solo or gang ship for PvP outside of just special circumstances. I have put it to some small tests so far and up to this point I am very happy with it's performance. The only downsides are the fact that seven Tech II guns to fit on a ship puts its cost considerably above a Rifter and that when overheating all those guns you pretty much get three cycles before the heat generated by all of them pushes everything to nearly offlining.

190 DPS at optimal, 6795 effective hitpoints, pretty much cap stable with the neut off and able to move at 1800 m/s before overheating. I do not currently fit rigs but when the rig changes are deployed I have more than enough powergrid left to fit some projectile weapon rigs to up the DPS even further.

Heimatar/Sinq Laison

Well over a month ago we decided to make a temporary corp move. Aurohunen, Mara and the Lonetrek region in general has become very blobby. While we can handle blobs, these ones have just become so unpredictable and unable to ever provide a fun fight that it simply became frustrating. Enemy pilots would sit for hours in belts and on stations waiting for us to engage so that their gang of battleships could jump in from a high security system and blob. Large groups of ships would sit outside our station just waiting for someone to make a mistake and get ganked. All of this we can handle just fine except for one caveat: 99% of these folks are positive security status. Already outnumbered and outgunned, we have timers and sentries against us in every situation.

For now we have moved into the Heimatar region very close to Amamake. It is still blobby for sure but things are considerably more consistent, predictable and a much larger percentage of the population has the balls to be negative security status and allow engagements on a more even ground. It has also led to a resurgence of us flying smaller and more agile ships to avoid the gatecamps and faction warfare blobs. Different but a great change of pace so far. One day we will go back to Aurohunen for it will always be our home but right now we are enjoying the fresh air.

Eternal Perseverance

When I first started my career in the universe of Eve, I was based out of a highsec system named Jel. Bordering Jel was the notorious and dangerous system of Egghelende. Constantly in Jel local you would hear stories about gate camps on the way into Egghelende and how meandering or loitering in that lowsec system was a recipe for certain death. On morethanone occasion I ran into the very pirates that populated and controlled the system and indeed it was not a safe place to be for a newb like me.

Amamake and the surrounding region is very dangerous and as a result we have been sticking to mostly smaller and more agile ships when practicing our trade. It has been a while since I have really broken out anything big for a fight but the past week a number of opportunities presented themselves that were only appropriate for some good old fashioned remote repping battleships.Python Cartel vs Some-Newbies-In-Geddons

Considering it has been far, far from my priority, my battleship skills have become pretty acceptable. Even with named guns I am able to push well over 1000 DPS in optimal range and including drone DPS on paper. The actual fit I am using at the moment though for our RR battleship groups:

About 900 DPS and a 90,000 EHP tank. I am strongly considering throwing Trimark rigs on which will boost the EHP to around 117,000. I prefer the Berserkers over the Ogre's in most situations as I find they are actually able to catch and damage battlecruisers and even some cruisers where as Ogre's really only shine in an up close battleship-only slugfest. Sometime in the next few months I will be adding Large Hybrid V to my list of skills to train and this Megathron should be come considerably more deadly.

God I hate Anonymous people that just post retarded comments all over peoples blogs. I mean honestly it just makes a huge mess of the comment section. Has no relevance to content that the blog shared, and if you weren't just a copy paste tool bag you would of realized that dates of such a nature occur frequently. 09:08:07 06/05/04 ~ The reverse of your date has all ready occurred.

05:04:03 02/01/00

or maybe next years

05:06:07 08/09/10Yep nothing that special will ever happen again in our life time.

Kirith: I actually thought some people might insult me for the fact I didnt have 3 MFS's fitted. I'd rather have a little more than than the extra 50 DPS though.

Anon: Only Destroyer IV. Not really any good reason to train V unless I want to get into an interdictor.

Leon: Really good point. I think I only lose like 2000 EHP by switching over and it leaves less HP for my mates to have to rep up. It might almost free up enough grid to fit a heavy cap booster too (I think).

Welcome to the Thrasher world. I think you may find it even more useful than you think.

Try fitting Arties on it,2xgyroII, put a sensor booster and a tracking computer. Add a dash of Tremor ammo and you have a 34km optimal (+11 falloff) frigate killer that can do 1.7km/s. DPS is a alittle lower (104 at my skills) but they will never get anywhere near you.

@Le Sac - I haven't used the setup since I left FW (4 mo. ago) but it worked really well. Enter Amarr minor plex, start timer and sit and wait for frigates to come in. It didn't take much. They would burn towards me and hope they could keep up before they were taken down. The trick is not to stand still.